Schmidt Delivered Read Online Free PDF

Mansour. You know, the financier who’s always in the papers. Of all things, he’s bought the old Crussel place. Shall I tell him you will come too?
    I don’t think so, Dad. I’ll skip your activities. All I want is to get some sun and have a talk with you. OK?
    Aha! The problem between her and Jon, whatever it was, hadn’t put a dent in her standards. Wouldn’t have Papa’s Puerto Rican tootsie at her wedding, won’t stay with her under the parental roof now. Let it be. Hadn’t poor Mary and he fitted out the pool house expressly to make young people’s weekend visits to the country easier?
    Absolutely. Be good!
    He went upstairs to shave. Across the landing from the room he shared with Carrie was Charlotte’s old room, which, after Mary died, Charlotte had shared with Jon on weekends. Until she and Schmidt quarreled. They had never returned, except when they came to see him in the hospital. Or had their primary motive been to get hold of the VW sitting in the garage, which he had given to Charlotte, and to count the silver, the silver he had told them he didn’t mean to part with while he was still alive? Schmidt threw the blade into the wastebasket and attached a new one to the razor. He wentover his face another time, slowly and with care, from time to time testing the skin for smoothness with his index finger. This wasn’t the moment to catalogue old insults. Granted that she had behaved badly, and the Rikers,
mère, père, et fils
, were deplorable. Wasn’t it the first time that, as an adult—if there had been other occasions he couldn’t remember them—she might be turning to him with a hurt? If there was something the matter—he found it difficult to imagine anything serious, probably it had to do with Jon’s working too hard or “their” not having become pregnant, something that, so far as he could tell, no one did anymore. If there was a problem, it had to be the Riker in-laws nagging her. In that case, he mustn’t let the least trace of satisfaction appear. An as yet unmeasurable opportunity to repair the damage between him and Charlotte: that’s what possibly lay before him. If only Carrie would help. At first, the absurdity of the pretension shocked him. That was something he would have had the right to expect from Mary, not from this child mistress. But there was no one alive he knew who had finer innate tact, no one more deeply benevolent.

II
    L ET’S take my car.
    He didn’t want to tell her that a huge cloud, as yet invisible in Bridgehampton, was gathering over him. Not until he knew its shape better, not until he had had another talk with Charlotte. He was going to the beach with Carrie for their daily walk. She kept the little BMW so clean that ordinarily she preferred to take his car. What’s a station wagon for if not to be full of sand. And beach toys, he might have added. But the evening was so deliciously soft that she wanted to drive with the top down.
    Hey, don’t forget to get the sand off your feet before you get in when we go home. Use the towel.
    Promise.
    Carrie the waif, Carrie attached to her one possession like a little housewife. To see her like this gave him a sad shot of pleasure, similar to the feeling in the old days when some action or gesture of Charlotte’s vividly showed that she was such a splendid girl, that Mary and he, although they were only children, and Mary an orphan to boot, had done wellbringing her up. Carrie’s driving way too fast once she got behind the wheel of the little convertible was another matter; had they used his car she would have rolled along sedately, as behooved a lady behind the wheel of a big fat Volvo. One balanced the other. Therefore, Schmidtie, avoid remarks about people in little red cars zipping over country roads at fifty. The tires protested when she hit the brakes in full view of the ocean. It waited there, blue and black, regular small breakers lining it near the beach like the furrows that once lined the potato